A rape victim is suing a Texas county after she was jailed for more than a month because authorities feared she wouldn’t be able to testify against her rapist.

A Texas court has heard that the victim suffered a mental breakdown during her rapist’s trial so she was put in prison because it was feared she would flee before finishing her testimony.

The woman, who is identified as Jane Doe in court documents, was raped in Houston in 2013 and was cooperating with prosecutors when she suffered a breakdown.

She was held in the general population at Harris County jail, the same place where the rape suspect was housed.

"Jane Doe found herself hopelessly trapped in a bizarre plot pulled from a Kafka novel," the court documents read.

She "was imprisoned in the hellhole of the Harris County Jail for no reason other than being a rape victim who struggles with a mental disability".

Ms Doe’s law suit says that when put in prison she was misclassified as the perpetrator of a sexual assault rather than the victim.

She was also attacked by an inmate, denied medication and punched in the face by a guard.

The treatment amounted to “an absolute deprivation of her personal integrity... As a rape victim, the psychological trauma she experienced was an overwhelming sense of hopelessness and helplessness,” her lawyer said.

“And if you take out the sexual violation itself and you look at the underlying psychological trauma, this is exactly what these defendants did to her again while she was still in recovery for her rape,” he concluded.